Add the Xerox Phaser 6180N ($500 street) to the small but growing list of relatively low-cost color lasers that can serve as workhorse printers in a small office or workgroup. Aside from a low price, entry into the club requires a combination of speed and paper handling that can smoothly handle relatively heavy-duty printing. The 6180N scores well on both counts and offers good-looking text and graphics as a bonus.

On the speed front, the 6180N offers a 26-pages-per-minute (ppm) rating for black-and-white printing and a 20-ppm rating for colornot to mention results on our tests that fully reflect those ratings. For paper handling, it offers as standard both a 250-sheet input tray and a 150-sheet multipurpose tray, giving you the option of keeping two different kinds of papersuch as letterhead and plain paperloaded at all times.

You can add a 550-sheet drawer ($400 street) if you need still more capacity. And you can add an optional duplexer ($200 street), although it's cheaper to buy the 6180DN model ($650 street) instead of upgrading the 6180N.

Color lasers in this price class tend to be big and heavy. The 6180N is a little heavier than most, at 59.8 pounds. (Don't try lifting this at home by yourself, kids.) But its size is typical, at 18.5 by 15.7 by 19.4 inches (HWD). Setup is reasonably typical as well, although the toner cartridges come in sealed bags instead of being shipped in place, as is the case with many lasers. Once you find a spot for the printer, you need only to remove the packing materials, install the cartridges and paper, connect the power cord and cable, and run the installation routinewhich, not so incidentally, is the most automated I've ever seen.

Network setup is a one-click operation. The program doesn't even ask how the printer is connectedit just looks for it, searching both USB ports and the network. It stops only for you to confirm that it found the right printer, and then again to announce that the installation is finished.

On our performance tests (timed with QualityLogic's hardware and software, www.qualitylogic.com), the 6180N turned in reasonably fast, but not exceptional, speeds. I timed it on our business applications suite at a total 10 minutes 22 seconds, effectively a dead heat with the similarly priced Dell Color Laser Printer 3110cn, which took 10:23. Interestingly, the 3110cn is built around a variation of the same engine that the 6180N uses, but it's tweaked differently to give it a faster rating for black-and-white printing, at 31 ppm, and a slower rating for color, at 17 ppm. Not surprisingly, despite the overall tie, the 3110cnwith its faster rating for blackand-white printingwas faster than the Xerox printer overall when printing our monochrome test files. Likewise, the 6180N was faster than the Dell printer overall on our color files.

The OKI Printing Solutions C3400n is a more telling point of reference, as a less expensive printer with similar speeds (although it's no match for either the Dell or Xerox printers on output quality). To get a significantly faster color laser you'd have to pay twice as much, for the Lexmark C534dn, which had a total time of 8:26.

Text quality is one of the 6180N's strong points, with output that's good enough for most desktop publishing needs. The 6180N managed to print more than half of our test fonts well enough to qualify as easily readable, with well-formed characters, at 4 points. And it did better than most with two highly stylized fonts with thick strokes, with one easily readable at 8 points and the other at 12 points.

Graphics output was typical for a color lasereasily good enough for any internal business need, including PowerPoint handouts, and arguably good enough for things like trifold brochures, depending on how much of a perfectionist you are. There were no major problems in our test output, but I saw visible dithering in the form of obvious graininess, slight misregistration (colors not lining up properly, leaving thin white gaps between solid areas of color), and a touch of unevenness in solid black areas but not with other colors.

Photos were at the low end of typical laser quality, making them easily good enough for things like client newsletters, printing Web pages with photos, and printing photos as part of an advertising handout.

Ideally, I'd like the 6180N to be a little faster and the graphics to be a touch better. But even as is, the total package adds up to make the printer a prime candidate if you need a small-office color-laser workhorse. And the combination of speed, quality, and paper handling is enough to earn it an Editors' Choice as well.

M. David Stone is an award-winning freelance writer and computer industry consultant. Although a confirmed generalist, with writing credits on subjects as varied as ape language experiments, politics, quantum physics, and an overview of a...

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